Syracuse Common Councilors Monday are expected to thrust the city into the debate over biometric surveillance. Lawmakers are expected to vote on legislation that would ban it from businesses in Syracuse.
Biometric surveillance uses information ranging from facial features to walking patterns, to identify customers as they walk into a store. Businesses say it’s a security strategy. Reports earlier this year said Wegmans was using facial recognition technology "in a small fraction" of its stores.
But opponents of biometric surveillance say it subjects law-abiding citizens to unregulated surveillance in public places. In a committee meeting last week, New York Civil Liberties Union Senior Policy Analyst Daniel Schwarz explained how the surveillance often goes wrong, citing 14 cases where biometric information led to wrongful arrests.
"It is dangerous when it works and it is even more dangerous when it doesn't work," said Schwarz. "We have data that showcases how inaccurate the technology is, how much higher the error rates are for black and brown people, for women, for young people, for older people, that has been confirmed by studies across the board from academia to the government."
It’s the impact on those populations that concerns lawmakers the most.
"People are much more likely to trust the output by a computer," said Schwarz. "And when this discrimination runs wild and is amplified by a system at scale, that's when we see those discriminatory impacts.
The issue is on the radar across the state. Onondaga County lawmakers passed a biometric disclosure law recently, requiring businesses to notify patrons about the use of the technology. There are also proposals in the New York State Legislature to deal with the issue.
